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Night Shift: PerfectA commissioned work by Hubbard/Birchler

Each episode for Season Three of Art in the Twenty-First Century concludes with an original work of video art by the artists Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler. Known for their haunting video projections, Hubbard and Birchler’s work alters temporal, cinematic and architectural expectations of the viewer through the use of looping narratives.

For Art in the Twenty-First Century, their first commission for television, they have created a series of beautiful and enigmatic short films. Each film uses the same setting—the interior of a police car at night—and begins when one officer brings a cup of coffee for another. Using recurring and non-recurring characters, interrelated dialogue, and ambient sound, the suite of films evoke not only the Season Three themes of Power, Memory, Structures and Play, but also sleep, dreams and longing.

Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.

Licensing

Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler live and work in Austin, Texas, as life partners and artist-collaborators. Together they make short films and photographs about the construction of narrative time and space, without the context of a traditional story line; their open-ended, enigmatic narratives elicit multiple readings. They began their collaboration in the mid-1990s, making sculpture, installation, photography, and performance-based work. Their interest in the construction and negotiation of space, architecture, and the function of objects in three dimensions plays a primary role in their work. Their productions reveal a strong sense of carefully constructed mise-en-scène that owes as much to natural-history-museum dioramas as to cinematic directorial techniques.